… Economically, even in a Canadian winter
(c) 2018, Davd
CBC News, among many other current sources, is telling Canadians that we are not eating enough vegetables (or in Politically Correct Baby Talk, “veggies”.)
Meanwhile “the low Canadian dollar” is making the prices of many vegetables in the grocery store “produce section”, higher than most anyone would have estimated ten or even five years ago1. When vegetables get to costing more than meat — most men, including me, choose meat most of the time.
Still, I do “eat my vegetables”, paying less for them than for meat: I include the expensive ones only when there is a very special, bargain price; and still, i have a good variety among the less expensive. As I often do, i follow the example of my good Métis grandfather (who kept a food garden and taught me many of those skills), and then expand on that.
Most winter meals, i eat the vegetables that back in his generation, were winter staples; and fairly often I add the likes of sprouts: Stored from Canada’s summer farms and gardens2, canned and frozen from Canada’s summer farms and gardens; and grown in big jars in the kitchen. Let’s use “a dollar a pound” as the round number dividing affordable from expensive vegetables, and call any that cost less than sixty cents a pound3, cheap.
Stored vegetables are better than trucked, i believe, especially if you or somebody you know grew them with a minimum of chemical poison and even chemical fertilizers. In the second blog in this Food series, i named four staple Canadian storage vegetables: Cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and turnips. (Perhaps i should also have named beets and parsnips4.) Trouble is, most suburban houses and nearly all apartments have no cold-but-never-frozen ‘room’ to turn into a real, serious root and cabbage cellar: So let’s look at canned vegetables first, and come back to stored.
Canned tomatoes, in particular, have been regularly available for less than that “dollar a pound”; indeed, they have often been available “cheap”. This month, December 2018, I bought canned diced tomatoes for about 50 cents per pound5; and have usually been able to buy them for less than 60 cents 6. Meanwhile, fresh tomatoes are being sold for $1.29 up to more than $2 per pound7.
Canned diced tomatoes make good, economical homemade salsa, and canned crushed [in a pinch, diced] tomatoes make good homemade chili and pasta sauce. If the seasoned canned tomatoes are on special, they can be heated as a vegetable to eat by itself… or mixed with rice to flavour the rice. I won’t try to predict whether canned tomatoes or fresh bean sprouts will be my #1 vegetable this winter; i will predict that I eat more of each than i do of the trucked “fresh” vegetables that cost over $2 per pound.
Canning your own garden vegetables seems to me to work for only a few. Tomatoes can well8, but are easy to freeze; and are commercially available canned at relatively lower prices than other canned vegetables. My favourite home canned foods are applesauce and berry jam; cherry and (dark) plum jams are also very good if your summer supply is that large.
Freezing vegetables in the summer is well worth doing if you have a surplus or a friend with more surplus than [s]he wants to freeze or can. This past summer, I did not get to can applesauce, which i quite regret; but in September i scavenged the remainder of a bed of spinach, chopped that harvest with a food processor, and steamed the chopped spinach to freeze. I only got 2-3 kilos, perhaps less than 2, of frozen blanched spinach from the effort; but it was “organic” spinach, frozen in 2 cm thick discs that i could readily cut in half to make two portions per disc9.
Green beans, broccoli if you grow a lot, and raw tomatoes are worth freezing: Tomatoes have skins which stop the fluid from evaporating, so when thawed, they have a soggy texture but nearly the same moisture content as when they were frozen.
(Frozen lettuce loses its crispness, of course; and i have no stomach for soggy lettuce, hot or cold. Doubt you have either.)
Now back to the stored vegetables: They are beets, cabbage, carrots, (parsnips if you like them, potatoes if you call them vegetables), and turnips. When you see any of them “on sale” you can buy more than you should of tender vegetables; they will keep for a month in the fridge with good care. In a good cellar they will keep through winter, if you grow storage varieties.
Beets are nearly always boiled; they can be boiled in plain water or flavoured with vinegar, allspice, and a little onion for a pleasantly different taste that can even go on a holiday relish tray.
Cabbages can be eaten raw if mild; steamed with caraway, and boiled in soups; the second blog in this series describes the technique for dividing a winter cabbage into two or three different parts for different cooking uses and-or eating raw. (Cole slaw is distinct from those techniques and worth learning; but requires a sauce, special shredding, and onions.)
Carrots can be eaten raw (If you do, shred them as in carrot-raisin salad, or chew thoroughly so you can digest them fully.) Steamed or eaten in soups and stir-fry dishes, they are easier to digest. They can also be semi-pickled in the brine from dill or sweet pickles — a technique that works with raw and also with steamed carrots.
Turnips, winter storage type, are yellow; and also called rutabagas. Sliced about 1 cm [3/8″] thick, or a little thinner, they are good salted and eaten raw. In stews, they are good boiled (cut them small if, like me, you don’t like their boiled texture very much.) When even cabbages are expensive, if rutabagas cost less, they can give a brassica taste to a soup instead of cabbage. And like carrots, they can be semi-pickled in the brine from dill or sweet pickles for a healthy “appetizer” or snack. I generally buy them on sale, often cut-priced because they have begun to get soft (which in the case of root vegetables, means water loss much more often than any kind of decay. You can often firm them up by setting in a container of water for a few hours, preferably in a fridge.)
Mung bean sprouts are the one genuinely fresh vegetable i can grow during an Alberta winter. (Asian friends can sprout soybeans, and most of them seem to prefer soybean sprouts; but i haven’t mastered that technique yet.) While a “fresh” head of broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, etc. might have been harvested a week or longer before you see it in a store display10; I can harvest mung bean sprouts that are absolutely fresh from the jar where i am growing them, pop those sprouts into a mug of chicken broth or a pot of soup, and eat them in minutes.11 What’s more, their cost qualifies as cheap,
Let’s count up these under-a-dollar-a-pound vegetables: Cabbage (you can eat it 3 ways at least), carrots (3 ways at least), canned tomatoes (3 ways at least), turnips [yellow] (2-3 ways), beets (2-3 ways), and bean sprouts (3 ways at least), for a total of six vegetables and 15-20 different vegetable dishes among which to choose. If you pickled cucumbers, froze green beans or spinach, stored some potatoes, maybe even made sauerkraut, all the better. Even without frozen and pickled, you have a decent variety of vegetables among which to circulate so you don’t get bored.
I eat “dry” beans, lentils, and peas “cooked from scratch” — that is, from dry stored form. They are not usually counted as vegetables, but they do provide vitamins, minerals, and fiber that meat and some grains, especially processed grains, relatively lack. Most days I have one meal of these “pulses” rather than meat; and some people would give me “veggie points” for doing so.
Finally, don’t forget apples and oranges, maybe bananas. They are fruits and not vegetables (Botanically, tomatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers are fruits also, but they are not sweet enough to be called fruits in the grocery trade.) They are fresh plant food at least as much as long-haul “fresh” vegetables; and unlike plums, grapes, and cherries, which i consider luxury foods out of season, they provide decent nourishment relative to their sugar content.
You can make it through the winter, if nothing worse than the present sad state of the loonie hits us, without paying outrageous prices for vegetables; and i hope you, too, resolve that next summer you will garden.
Notes:
1. “… if you live on social assistance or a pension or you are working for minimum wage, you are unlikely to be able to afford the kind of healthy diet recommended in Canada’s Food Guide.” CBC quotes one Trish Hennessy, “of Upstream, a non-profit group focused on healthy living,”
2. Stored Canadian vegetables are beginning to get prominence in the retail stores. Last week’s flyer from the store that usually has the best prices, featured beets, cabbage, potatoes, and onions, all “product of Western provinces”, The cabbage was priced below 70 cents per pound; the others, below 40 cents when bought in 10 pound units… in mid December.
3= $ 1.32 per kilo…
4. I like beets, but parsnips don’t really seem that much fun to eat—to me. If you enjoy them, don’t let me stop you.
5. 88 cents for 796 ml = $1.11 per litre ≈ kilo of contents.
6. $1. per can works out to 58 or 59 cents per pound of contents.
7. Some of those fresh tomatoes are trucked from greenhouse operations near Medicine Hat, less than half a day’s drive away with no border delays. How long they sit in storage facilities, i don’t know… presumably no longer than the ones that already have had long truck rides from California or Mexico.
8. Acid foods, like tomatoes and many fruits, do not support botulism bacteria. If you are going to can beans, corn, spinach, etc., prudence dictates either boiling them after you open the jar, before eating — or pickling them while canning. Most canned beets my friends “put up”, are pickled; as are sauerkraut and cucumber pickles.
9. The discs were made using shallow containers about the diameter of a cottage cheese container but much shorter. Once frozen, they could be dropped out of those containers and into a plastic food bag, where those i have not yet eaten, sit in the freezer waiting.
10. I do take multi-vitamin pills in the winter; because, of the vegetables i eat, only the bean sprouts are really fresh.
11. Mung bean sprouts are best raw, or else “blanched” — cooked very briefly below the temperature of boiling water. If you are going to use them as a blanched salad, then I suggest steaming them very briefly over vegetable stock, to which they will add a little in flavour and nutrition.
